The gasoline crisis continues: tin is 44,000

For more than a week, the people of Baalbek-Hermel spend long hours in queues outside petrol stations to get less than 4 liters of gasoline for 10,000 pounds, amid fights, problems and discretion. While the station owners control quantities and prices, there is no semblance of surveillance by the relevant ministries and security agencies.

Many stations raised their hoses and preferred to close to customers, while the owners of the stations that opened their doors played to determine the number of liters and impose a price of more than 35 thousand pounds for a can of gasoline. They are hiding behind the crisis of delivering “limited rations” of gasoline from the Zahrani refinery, while the market is thirsty and the stations are empty.

One of them explained to “Al-Akhbar” that the quantities delivered to the stations “are very limited and do not exceed 20% of the quantity they received before the crisis. These quantities cannot meet the growing demand after the shortage that witnessed the Bekaa stations for more than a week, “denying that the owners The stations store the material while waiting for the price increase, because” gasoline cannot be stored like diesel and the stations in the region do not have tanks Huge Storage “.

The owner of a fuel station in the city of Baalbek indicated that the absence of monitoring by the Ministry of Economy, the Consumer Protection Authority and the security services in charge of verifying the quantities received has led the owners of the stations to fall into the trap of financial temptations provided by merchants and smugglers from the Bekaa and the North, as the station owner is offered to sell his share as soon as it is received. The refinery “with its land, without incurring the costs of transporting it to the Bekaa and unloading it into the station’s tanks, at attractive prices of up to 44,000 pounds per tank.

He stressed that “a large number of station owners sell their daily rations at the refinery, reducing the amount of gasoline that reaches the Baalbek-Hermel and Bekaa stations, as well as continuing smuggling to Syria, albeit at a rate lower than a few days ago, following the measures taken by the army. He noted that “the appearance of merchants from the north to buy gasoline from the owners of the Bekaa stations is evidence of the activity of smuggling operations from the north to Syria.”